Central America in the Crosshairs of War

An unforgettable account of how misguided and illegal U.S. policies in Central America during the 1980s resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, created many of today’s problems along America’s Southern Border, and helped perpetuate a legacy of hawkish militarism at the expense of democracy and diplomacy.During the 1980s, the United States financed and directed wars against popular movements in Central America. Vowing to block “Soviet expansion,” the U.S. waged a Vietnam-style counterinsurgency in El Salvador while orchestrating a covert and illegal war to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Some 75,000 died in El Salvador, and more than 30,000 were killed in Nicaragua, most of them civilians. Countless more were displaced. Meanwhile, with tacit U.S. support, the Guatemalan military razed hundreds of Indigenous communities and killed more than 200,000 people during a civil war that claimed the lives of 100,000 Mayan villagers.Scott Wallace arrived in Central America in 1983 to cover these conflicts as a freelance “stringer” for CBS News and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as Newsweek, The Independent, and The Guardian. Traveling along the frontlines of war, Wallace evolved a distinctive reporting style that included photojournalistic portraits of startling intimacy, page-turning tales of high adventure, and incisive analysis of the events he witnessed. The result is this unforgettable account of a reporter coming of age on the battlefield as he seeks the truth amid a landscape rife with death and deception.Introduced by the Honorable Christopher J. Dodd, readers will find within these pages a compelling and eye-opening narrative and visual record of the conflicts that continue to reverberate in the crisis on America’s southern border with Mexico and in policy decisions made in Washington that impact families at home and throughout the world. Situating the exercise of U.S. power on a continuum running from Vietnam through Central America to Iraq, where he later reported, Wallace provides a rare look into the real-life consequences of morally dubious policies while offering a gripping primer for aspiring foreign correspondents and field reporters.In Central America in the Crosshairs of War, Scott Wallace presents a compelling memoir that not only reboots America’s history of misadventures overseas since Vietnam, but also restores faith in the importance and power of journalism at a time when “disinformation” and “alternate realities” abound in America and abroad. As Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Debrorah Nelson observers: “Scott Wallace takes us along his harrowing journey into the Central American jungles for an important historical accounting that draws a sharp line from the U.S. proxy wars of the 1980s to today’s crises in those countries and at our own southern border.”

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